Where Did They Hide the Bodies?

In a stunning admission Monday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they had discovered that 10 more people had died in immigration detention than the agency had previously acknowledged.

The 10 additional deaths bring to 104 the number of in-custody deaths that occured on ICE’s watch since October 2003. People detained by ICE include those charged with violating immigration law as well as some asylum seekers waiting for the government to decide their cases.

The deaths came to light this summer when ICE was responding to a Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the death of a detainee whose name had not been included on an earlier list of in-custody deaths, officials said.

ICE chief John Morton called the discovery a “serious matter” and added, “This highlights why I am passionate about the need for more direct federal oversight of ICE’s detention system and the critical importance of the detention reforms I announced two weeks ago.”

Detainees — 32,000 at any given time — are currently held in 350 different private, state and local prisons and jails. Human rights organizations and government watchdog agencies have found that the standards of treatment are dangerously inadequate.

Hector Veloz, a U.S. citizen from birth who spent 13 months locked up by ICE in an Eloy, Ariz., prison, told me that in the spring of 2008 he saw a man die in the prison recreation yard while waiting for emergency medical help, which arrived too late.

“It was scary and traumatic,” said Veloz, who eventually convinced the government to release him. “I thought about the person’s family… and what if I had some kind of a seizure?”

The most recent casualty was a 24-year-old Ethiopian man, Huluf Guangule Negusse, who died Friday in Tallahassee while awaiting deportation, according to ICE.